Ignacio Carillo (Mauricio Munoz) is a juglar, or a wandering singing minstrel from the northern coast of Colombia. After the death of his wife, he decides to stop playing music and return his accordion to its original owner, supposedly because it is cursed. He is followed by a local teenager (Yull Nuñez), who idolizes the juglar and wants to be just like him one day. Carillo is a man of few words, and decides to let the boy accompany him on the long journey, although it is never really clear why. Is he the boy’s father?
Carillo is a musical legend, whose fame has spread far and wide over the coastal region, so much so that people get angry when he says he won’t play anymore. But, short of cash and without food, he finds that he still needs to play for his supper. His young partner tries to learn the secrets of being a great musician from the old master, but Carillo’s words are few and his help is nonexistent. The boy has to learn from the few gigs that the accordionist plays for some extra cash. One memorable scene features various accordion players dueling in a way that is similar to how rappers battle each other freestyle. The singers play riffs on the accordion while they think up rhyming couplets to diss each other, until one singer finds himself unable to respond and the victor is declared. The dueling singers play in a ring, surrounded by drunks and revelers who could just as easily be watching a pair of cocks slashing each other with razor blades, hooting at every expertly delivered musical insult.
Lured by a cash prize, Carillo ends up playing at the first Vallenato Legend Festival in Valledupar, in 1968. The tambor percussionist for the festival quits when he sees that he will be playing with Carillo, who supposedly fought with the guy’s cousin a long time ago. The accordionist is about to give up and lament his cursed instrument when the young boy volunteers his services. Before taking the stage, Carillos sees a woman who he might recognize, accompanied by a young son. Carillo was a party animal who routinely cheated on his wife, maybe leaving sons all over the coast that he has never known. Instead of competing seriously for the desperately needed financial reward offered for the vallenato king at the festival, he is spooked by a vision of his past and plays a children’s song about a wooden toy horse. The boy who may or may not be his son pays rapt attention, but the rest of the crowd is silent, freaked out by the weird nursery rhyme of a song. It is an arresting moment from a man who otherwise pretends he doesn’t have any emotions.
There is a staggering amount of beautiful scenery in the film. The salt flats of Manuare, the desert coast of the Guajira Peninsula, the plains of the Cesar department and many other iconic natural wonders of Colombian coastal region share the screen with the two principal actors, who are dwarfed by the various unpopulated landscapes. They wander to the poor fishing village of La Cienaga, where Carillo is sort of forced to play accordion while two peasants fight with machetes to death. The loser falls helplessly off a bridge and into the ocean, while Carillo doesn’t miss a beat on his instrument. In another breathtaking scene, a sick Carillo is taken by white-clad Arawak Indians to the snowy mountains of the Sierra Nevada, where the natives play Andean flutes over his near-lifeless body. All of these scenes gain extra power from the use of locals speaking native languages like Wayuunaiki, Ikun, and Palenquero, and the various languages and landscapes used in the film show a coastal Colombia that is a diverse mix of cultures and climates, much more than the sombrero vueltiao-clad party animal that inhabits the region in popular imagination.
The Wind Journeys is the story of how the minstrel vallenato tradition turned into the Colombian pop music of today. Long before Silvestre Dangond became Colombia’s reigning king of pop, Vallenato was the folk music of the region, played by cowboys and ranch hands to pass the time on lonely prairies. When the Vallenato Legends Festival was getting started in the late sixties, the music began spreading to nearly every region of the country, getting played on the radio and becoming the soundtrack to the parties of people who couldn’t rope a steer if they tried. This is a great film for those who just think of vallenato as that annoying accordion music that Colombians like for some weird reason. Seeing where this music actually comes from is a revelation, and could just change a few minds.
Carranga comes from the mountainous department of Boyaca, about two hours north of Bogota. It was almost single-handedly founded by a veterinarian from the region named Jorge Velosa in the 1970s. While studying at Bogota’s National University, Velosa became interested in reviving interest in the music, culture, poetry, clothing, and customs of the people he grew up with. He began writing songs about the everyday concerns of people from Boyaca, their romances, parties, farms, and natural environment. He used their local colloquialisms in his lyrics, and dressed in the clothing of a typical campesino from the region when he played live, including the woolen poncho known as a ruana, that is used in the region to keep warm.
The music struck a chord all over Colombia. Its addressing of concerns specific to poor campesinos was in keeping with the other contemporary folk movements like nueva trova that had political messages in their songs demanding change and social justice. Soon enough, Velosa was also a television star acting in Colombian comedy programs. In 1981 he became the first Colombian artist to play live at Madison Square Garden arena in New York City; however, because of their simple rural-style clothing, a limousine that was supposed to take Velosa and his band to the concert failed to recognize them and pick them up, and they arrived late to the performance.
Carranga is guitar-based, and derived from older forms of Colombian music like bambuco from Colombia’s interior and merengue (not to be confused with the Dominican music of the same name) from the Colombian coast. The main instruments are a 12-string steel guitar known as a tiple, and a six-string nylon guitar known as a requinto. Percussion comes in the form of a wooden ridged stick called a guacharaca that the singer rubs with a fork to keep rhythm. The resulting sound is folky, more or less what you would imagine a Colombian hootenanny to sound like. But the sound can be expanded; this past year Velosa played a series of concerts with the Bogota Philharmonic, adapting his music to be played with a full orchestra.
An example of two of Velosa’s most famous songs are given below:
La Cucharita (The Little Spoon)
This song recounts the receiving of a gift, a little spoon made of animal bone given by a friend. It is a country gift, and when the narrator goes to Bogota, he is robbed downtown, and they take everything, including his ID and the spoon. However, the friend who gave him the spoon says he will make him another one to replace it. That’s the whole song, guy gets spoon, guy loses spoon, guy will get a new spoon just like the old one. Life sounds pretty simple up in Boyaca.
Julia, Julia, Julia
This is a song dedicated to the girl mentioned in the title, who the narrator loves “more then his truck” (It’s like country music!). He recounts their courtship, and notes that he will try to fly his truck to go see her if they are far apart.
Carranga was originally conceived as self-consciously simple music celebrating the plainspoken, humble dignity of the rural working poor, and lives on today as the unofficial soundtrack to life in the hilly regions of Colombia’s interior. Velosa and his band, the Carrangueros, still play shows regularly, especially in small towns throughout the country, while a weekend in the colonial tourist enclave of Villa De Leyva will feature a number of Carranga bands playing at any given moment, making the music fairly easy to check out in its natural habitat.
Colombia is home to a great many fruits I had never even heard of before coming here. With this post, I am starting an informal series on what these fruits are like, and how I enjoy them. First in line is one of my favorites: the maracuya, or as it is known in English, passion fruit.
Maracuya is originally native to this region of South America, but is now grown wherever a tropical climate permits. In Colombia, the fruit is yellow, and contains a yellow-orange mix of citrus pulp inside with black seeds. To my tongue, it tastes like a tartier and tangier orange. The fruit is a good source of vitamin C, and good for those who have high blood pressure.
Contrary to popular belief, the fruit does not get its English name for its aphrodisiacal qualities, but is instead named for its blossoming flower, which supposedly resembles the story of the passion of Jesus Christ. Wikipedia actually lists the supposedly symbolism that each part of the flower represents, reflecting a different aspect of the story of the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus, but it mostly just sounds like a Christian stoner rambling on. For example, the tendrils of the flower represent the whips used to flagellate Christ. Um, sure.
My favorite thing to do with passion fruit is make the juice with milk. My easy recipe goes like this:
1. Cut the fruit in half, dumping the pulp and seeds of five or six maracuyas into a blender. When buying the maracuyas at the market, the best ones with the most pulp are the ones where you can hear the contents rattle inside when you shake them. If you can’t hear or feel anything when are shaking the maracuya, it is not ready for consumption.
2. Liberally pour brown sugar into the blender. I usually err on the side of too much sugar rather than too little to balance out the acidity of the fruit juice.
3. Fill the blender with a liter or so of milk. I find that a box or bag of any given widely available milk in Colombian supermarkets fits the contours of my blender perfectly. Due to the fact that I can’t stop drinking the maracuya juice after I make it, I generally use lactose-free milk, which goes down the digestive tract a little easier.
4. Toss in a half dozen ice cubes to chill the juice, especially if the milk is not refrigerated. Blend it!
5. Strain the crushed seeds out of the juice mix using a strainer. The leftover milk and juice is now ready to drink, and will be spectacular, very similar in texture to a milkshake.
I have a confession to make: part of the reason I came to Colombia was because of its infamy and danger. A lot of people, tourists and Colombians alike, tend to overcompensate for Colombia’s recent history and violence, rolling their eyes when cocaine, guerillas, and sex tourism come up in a conversation. “Come on, you can’t always focus on the negative,” they will say, and they have a point. There are plenty of beautiful things in this country that nobody notices or knows about because they are overshadowed by Pablo Escobar and an endless amount of fighting and corruption. But both the negative and positive aspects of Colombia fascinate me. It seems pointless to me to isolate all of Colombia’s positive points in a vacuum, unsoiled by brutality and sleaze. That’s not the country I have come to know and love, and to pretend otherwise is to condescend, or even worse, let the bad guys off the hook through focused inattention. The trick is to strike a balance; it makes no sense to ignore the negative aspects of Colombia that are staring you right in the face, but it is equally sad when people around the world are blinded by Colombia’s negative press so much that they assume nothing good exists here. How can you describe both sides of Colombia?
Charles Nicholl (pictured below) is an English journalist who started coming to Colombia in the 1970s. During his first trip, the cocaine trade was still in its infancy. Any doofus gringo could show up in Colombia and get involved in trafficking on the ground floor. Nicholl does some small time drug interdiction in Santa Marta, sleeping in an extra room at the Fruit Palace, a store that sells natural fruit juices and doubles as a front for cocaine deals. His job is mostly helping two people meet, or helping to pass information from one person to another. It is a little exciting, but mostly innocent, small-time stuff, the kind of hijinks you remind yourself of years later while mowing the lawn of your suburban home, and thinking, “You know, I used to be a little bit crazy back in the day.”
When Nicholl returns to Colombia 12 years later, at the behest of a newspaper editor who wants the Great Cocaine Story, the game has changed. This is the era of kingpins, who will murder anyone who even asks one too many questions. Gangs patrol the trade with viciousness and no remorse. Nicholl meets up with his old Scottish buddy Gus in a fleabag apartment in southern Bogota. Gus has been researching a possible pipeline of potent cocaine called Snow White getting sent to Europe, and was stabbed in the leg for his nosiness. He is afraid, and hiding, and doesn’t even want to see a doctor to get his gangrenous and smelly gash treated. He has a “Who’s Who” of the cocaine trade that he has been researching for several years, with lots of photocopies and bits of information that seemingly go in circles. He is of course a user, smoking a type of Colombian crack called bazuco, eating terribly, and generally not aging well. He gives Nicholl what he can, and points him in the direction of the Snow White story.
Trying to get info, everyone thinks Nicholl is a narc, so to prove them wrong he has to share their drugs and get drunk with them, as well as bribe people for information. Nicholl parties with Gus´ friends, and hears stories from mules, dealers, and smugglers. Eventually, He traces the path of Snow White to a slaughterhouse on the edge of Bogota. There is a great scene there where Nicholl sees a man at the abattoir that he recognizes as a dealer’s heavyset bouncer from a previous meeting. On the one hand, he has successfully traced a cocaine smuggling route; on the other, if this bouncer sees him, he will know that Nicholl is on the trail and will kill him. Nicholl takes you there, the exhilaration of good reporting mixed with the terror of his possibly imminent death. Neither Gus nor Charles seems to know which they find more exciting, which is why they are journalists in Colombia at the height of the cocaine boom. As much as I want to write about Colombia, would I want to do this? My brain says hell yeah, but my heart just wants to chill. Getting killed over a story about a drug that should probably be decriminalized just seems like a pointless way to go, even if the adrenaline is pumping as you get assassinated.
There are some great asides in this book that have nothing to do with drugs or anything else negative related to Colombia, and it makes for an excellent introduction to Colombian food and music. He describes the meals he has and songs he hears in great detail, explaining everything from chicharrones (pork rinds) to aguardiente to joropo harp music from the llanos plains region. He includes lots of information related to the region’s history stretching all the way back to pre-Columbian times. There is a trip to Boyaca to visit a friend’s family, where Nicholl spends his time drinking peacefully and going for a swim. At one point, Nicholl hustles Gus out of Bogota and ends up getting stuck in the sticky jungles of the Choco department, where he is trapped because flights are infrequent, and a landslide has blocked the road to Medellin. He ends up trying to get out by boat, and lands in Buenaventura en route to Popayan. By some writerly stroke of luck or lack of luck, he finds himself in Popayan during a destructive 1983 earthquake in the middle of the city’s famous Easter week procession. Then he is trapped in Popayan as an earthquake makes travel difficult for the many tourists in town when he is there. He takes any bus he can to a small town in the department of Huila, eventually renting a donkey to get to San Agustin, where he can finally get a bus back to Bogota. The whole nightmare of a journey takes three weeks of uncertain and roundabout traveling, but there is an element of fun to it as well. Who wouldn’t want to spend almost a month to unhurriedly voyage around the backwaters of Colombia, finding new and creative ways to get from point A to point B?
Finally, Nicholl goes back to Santa Marta, trying to pass himself off as a guy interested in moving coke to Europe. He works his way up the chain of command, snooping around pretending that he has to make sure everything is kosher for his bosses back in England before he can go ahead with the operation. But he is caught by the smugglers in the middle of writing his story at a hotel, and they almost kill him, threatening to “change his oil”, or stab him in the stomach. However, instead of murdering Nicholl, the dealers make him a go-between in a cocaine drop-off at Santa Marta’s port that ends up failing. A punctured plastic bag of cocaine begins leaking out of its briefcase as a nervous Nicholl attempts to hand it off, and hilarity ensues as he attempts to hide the trickle of coke from port security guards and bureaucrats. Along the way, Nicholl also has sex with an underage prostitute, in a vignette that is merely creepy.
It’s hard to imagine a reporter having this much freedom, money, and time to blow in this era of newspaper closings and slashed budgets. Nicholl has months to write one story, and chase all sorts of leads and macguffins. He doesn’t seem to have a deadline, and barely communicates with his editor. He meanders and wanders into dead ends constantly, and is as aimless as you would expect a regular coke user to be. Overall, the book is a bit of a mess, a travelogue mixed with gonzo journalism in the style of Vice Magazine third world travel guides. Some characters leave the narrative and never return, not even in a “Where are they now?” kind of way. I suppose that’s reality, but Nicholls lets these people slide off the page without a sound, and the effect can be jarring.
The book is also dated. Not to say that there is not still some (or a lot of) cocaine around being dealt, snorted, or smoked here, but Colombia is much less violent and a little more cosmopolitan these days. There is still plenty of truth to the slowness and bureaucracy that Nicholl describes, and Choco for example is almost exactly as the author left it. If you have drug habits similar to those of Nicholl or Hunter S. Thompson, or just like reading about people who do, you will like this book. If you get all defensive when the subject of drugs or homicide in Colombia comes up, this is not the book for you. In fact, Nicholl may have written it specifically to annoy you. The Fruit Palace is currently out or print, which seems ridiculous for a book about such a salacious topic in an emerging tourist economy. However, if you can find it, it is one of the better introductions to Colombia out there, negative stereotypes and all. The more self-righteous folks among you coming to Colombia to pretend that side of the country doesn’t exist can continue gleaning whatever insight you can from 100 Years of Solitude, but the rest of us will find this book to be the perfect companion between shots of guaro at the local cantina.
Despite having at least two dozen salsa bars, and a currently thriving live salsa scene, Bogota is not known as a “Salsa city” in the way that Cali or Barranquilla is. Fighting against that perception, the fourteenth annual free admission Salsa Al Parque festival is set to take place in two locations this weekend in downtown Bogota. On Friday, August 19th, there is the Grandes de la Salsa concert, which will take place in the Plaza de Bolivar main governmental square between Carreras 7 and 8 and between Calles 10 and 11. This is the one that features all of the international acts invited to play, along with some winners from a local talent search of the best salsa bands in Bogota. It kicks off at 2 p.m. and will last until 1 in the morning. On Sunday, August 21st, the music continues at the outdoor bandshell the Media Torta (Calle 18 No.1-05 Este). This features a lineup totally composed of Bogotano and Colombian salsa bands, and lasts from 11:30 a.m. until 7 p.m. With the recent passing of legendary Colombian salsa singer Joe Arroyo, there are a number of tributes planned, and one can certainly expect songs from his oeuvre to be jammed on throughout the weekend. About 35,000 salsa fans attended the event last year.
For a full schedule with the entire lineup for both days, check out the official Salsa Al Parque website. I have made some recommendations about my favorite acts below, along with posting some videos of their greatest songs to get you in a dancing mood. See you at the plaza!
Bobby Valentin – Friday, August 19th, 5:40 p.m.
Known as the El Rey del Bajo (King of the Bass), this Nuyorican salsero was a musical arranger for New York’s legendary Fania Records. On the song below, “Descarga Fania”, Bobby plays bass with the Fania All-Stars on a song he wrote and arranged, giving himself a bad-ass solo to undergird the tune in the process.
Rey Ruiz – Friday, August 19th, 7:10 p.m.
Known as El Bombón de Salsa (The Salsa Cutie Pie) Cuban singer Ray Ruiz has been performing and studying music since childhood, but didn’t get his big break until he defected from the country while touring in the Dominican Republic. He made his way to the United States, where he got a contract with Sony Records and promptly became one of the hottest salsa singers of the 1990s. Has a bit more of a poppier sound than the classic era of Bobby Valentin.
Calambuco – Friday, August 19th, 8:40 p.m.
This Bogota band, made up of musicians from the city as well as from Cali and the city of Quibdo in Choco, is bringing the old sound of classic 1970s “salsa brava” back into fashion again.
Roberto Roena – Friday, August 19th, 9:50 p.m.
This percussionist and orchestra leader is all over the history of salsa music. He was an original member of Puerto Rico’s first big salsa group, El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico. He has also been a member of the Fania All-Stars and later formed his own group, Robert Roena y Su Apollo Sound. He is famous for his showmanship, flying over the crowd with a harness and wearing crazy outfits like a rock musician when performing live, although he has mellowed out a bit these days. He is also known to bust out salsa versions of songs like “Spinning Wheel” by Blood, Sweat and Tears, and “Every Breath You Take” by the Police. The song below, “Coro Miyare”, is famous for its many performances with his dancer uncle Anibal Vazquez, for a combination of instrumental jamming and choreography that wowed audiences.
Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz – Friday, August 19th, 11:20 p.m.
Together for over 40 years, these Puerto Rican musicians are credited with keeping rock and roll from becoming popular in Puerto Rico because their salsa was so good. With their horn charts and frenetic rhythms, the duo and their orchestra became one of the most popular salsa groups of all time. When the popularity of salsa was overtaken by meregue music in the 1980s, they survived by playing Christian salsa and found a whole new audience, although they will be playing the secular jams live. Check out their most epic song, “Sonido Bestial” (Beastly Sound) below.
Maite Hontele – Sunday, August 21st, 3:50 p.m.
Who says a Dutch girl can’t play salsa? Maite was born in the land of tulips and wooden shoes, but her father was a huge fan of Latin music and raised her on a steady diet of it. After studying trumpet in a Rotterdam conservatory, she went out on tour with the Cuban band Buena Vista Social Club, which took her around the world and all over Latin America. After several tours in Colombia with other bands, including a gig at the Medellin Jazz Festival, she decided to just cut out the middleman and relocate to Medellin permanently. According to the programming for this festival, her band is considered a nationally-based orchestra, making her an honorary Colombian!
La 33 – Sunday, August 21st, 6:05 p.m.
This band is probably the most popular salsa band in Colombia right now, and if you have ever been to a party here you have no doubt heard their Latinized version of the Pink Panther theme song. Named after the street in the Bogota neighborhood of Teusaquillo where they formed, this band doesn’t just stick with salsa, mixing in all sorts of classic sounds like mambo, boogaloo, and Cuban son into their concert repertoire. They also do a killer salsa version of the Police’s “Roxanne”.
This film is based on a true story that director Sergio Cabrera read in the in the news about an eviction notice served to people living in a house that got stuck in red tape, and by the time the authorities went to evict everyone, they found that the house didn’t exist anymore and the people had disappeared. It reflects a huge irony about Colombian society, in that it is riddled with byzantine amounts of documentation and bureaucracy that are routinely ignored for convenience’s sake, until it benefits somebody to arbitrarily enforce the rules. It’s no coincidence that such an alternately over-regulated and at the same time corrupt system coexists with an oligarchic economic structure where a microscopic minority holds and mostly inherited the vast majority of the wealth. Using a group of squatters, a rich landowner, and ambiguous interpretations of Colombian law as a backdrop, this film meditates on the way forward towards a fairer and more equal society: is it possible through the letter of the law, or is the system so rigged in favor of the rich and powerful that only rebellion will suffice?
The story begins flashback-style: Vallenato singer Carlos Vives (pictured above, right) plays a reporter with dorky oversized glasses who hears a story about how some squatters in the La Candelaria neighborhood in Bogota stood up to the affluent bullies and authorities who tried to kick them out of their house. A Colombian law says that if an abandoned estate is occupied by squatters for a certain amount of time, they take ownership of the land. The original, wealthy owner, Dr. Holguin (Victor Mallarino), is a jerk who drives a sports car, and who wants to take back the 48-room mansion called the Casa Uribe where the squatters live, but they put up a fight. The residents lock the doors and have a shootout with the cops who try to kick them out, which results in the death of one of the tenants’ children from the police’s bullets.
A lawyer among the squatters, Romero (Frank Ramirez, pictured above, left) , who thinks the strict application of the law solves all problems, helps to delay the eviction through the exploitation of a number of legal technicalities in the shooting’s aftermath. He is well-educated, and knows how to speak the legalese and balderdash that government officials and police in the movie speak automatically when rich people tell them to. During this delay, Jacinto (Fausto Cabrera, pictured above, right), a Spanish stage manager and anarchist who lives next door, devises a plot: what if the tenants, using pulleys and levers like those used for the scenery in a play, can take the house apart and leave only the façade? You know, like how a snail moves his shell house wherever he goes, however slowly and however long it may take?
Romero argues with Jacinto, and says that outlaw behavior like that is no solution. The law is meant for all, and can resolve everything peacefully. However, Holguin’s goons kidnap Romero and beat the crap out of him, leaving him mentally incapacitated. Maybe the law works, but it requires a sharp lawyer, and now the tenants don’t have one. The squatters are a colorful lot; there is a guy who owns a huge snake, a pious woman taking care of her vegetable of a father, and a transvestite (Florina Lemaitre – a woman playing a man who is pretending to be a woman) trying to dress like a man again, among other oddballs who have collected at the house over the years. They are a cranky, cantankerous bunch, and getting them all to agree to anything is an arduous task, but after Romero’s beating they realize that they have no choice, and must follow Jacinto’s plan or leave their homes with a whimper. The tenants move the possessions of the whole house to another building through the roof, so that the police and bureaucrats can’t see them take anything out the front. An image of the Virgin Mary appears on the walls of the house when the tenants begin moving their furniture, which they take as a sign that the mission is blessed, and indeed the chunk of wall with Mary’s picture on it is the first item that gets moved. United by disgust at Dr. Holguin and the government, the tenants all do their part to make the strategy of the snail succeed.
To say more about exactly how the plan succeeds would be cheating the viewer out of some genuine surprises that the movie has as it barrels towards its conclusion. The ending is satisfying and feels genuinely Colombian, in that it is a big flip of the bird to everyone, including the squatters themselves, who nonetheless get a lot of pleasure screwing over the rich and powerful any way that they can. The battle for Casa Uribe becomes a fight for dignity. The law has been ignored for the benefit of one rich man, instead of dozens of poor people. You get the sense that these squatters have been evicted and stepped on before. They finally were able to stay somewhere and develop a community, only to have it dismantled at the whim of a playboy.
The central question of the film is what works to improve the lot of the disenfranchised: the legal and proper path, or revolt? The movie says that the former is a path that the rich and powerful use to take what they like, hiding all the while behind a legal code written and enforced for the benefits of the haves at the expense of the have-nots. Romero gives it his best shot, using any legal loophole he can think of to delay the proceedings. But in a society where the rich can violently assault the lower classes with impunity, the movie endorses using a little creativity to make up for that inequality.
At first, when listening to Champeta, you might believe that it is music from Africa. This is because it originally is. Champeta not only derives from the African tribal music brought over to Colombia during the slave trade hundreds of years ago, but also recently crystallized as a genre when the port cities on the Colombian Caribbean coast began importing a steady trickle of African music LPs from the continent during the 1970s. If it were not for the lyrics sung in Spanish, one could easily imagine the music being from a lion-stalked savannah, but it is instead a reflection of the mix of cultures and historical trends that make up the Afro-Colombian experience.
Taking the music all the way back in time to its real roots requires going back before independence to when Colombia was still a Spanish colony. The city of Cartagena, a port on the Caribbean Sea, was a major center for the importation of African slaves. However, a good amount of slaves managed to flee and hide in the jungle, where they founded free cities known as “Palenques”, including the first and most iconic, San Basilio de Palenque, located about two hours south of Cartagena by bus. Even today, most of the population in these towns is descended from these runaway slaves, and in San Basilio a language called Palenquero, a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, and the African language Kikongo from Angola and the Congo, is still spoken. The New York Times has written about this language, which is currently in danger of extinction.
In the 1970s, sailors traveling to Africa began bringing back records by African superstars such as Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade, who were mixing North American rhythm and blues with traditional African forms of music in genres such as soukous and highlife from countries like Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. DJs began playing the records at house and street parties on giant loudspeakers called picós, which often had crazy and colorful graffiti-like designs painted over them. The records were popular at parties, and the relative scarcity of new and novel African records made the DJs competitive. As dancers and fans became familiar with specific records, DJs were loathe to share music with one another, as they wanted to throw the biggest parties with the most varied collection of vinyl. DJs scratched the names and artists off of records to keep their favorites to themselves and their own parties. Demand for new music began to outstrip supply, and Colombians responded by making their own imitations of the African music they were hearing but by mixing it with reggae and soca riddims as well as the Latin percussion from cumbia and salsa, and champeta was born. Or perhaps it is better to say, the Afro-Colombian descendents of African slaves finally reconnected with their roots and brought the journey of their music from one continent to the other full circle.
The name Champeta comes from a knife that is similar to a machete, used on the coast for chopping fruits and vegatables, cutting sugarcane, and sometimes self-defense. But it is also a code word, originally used to describe the working-class black people who would become the music’s audience as vulgar, ignorant, and above all poor. Similar to Yankee Doodle, the Afro-Colombians adopted the term as their own, and the music reflects the vitality of a people that live close the edge of socioeconomic calamity and without pretension. Some of the cheapest electronic instruments are used to make the popular version of the music that dominates radios in Cartagena these days, including Casio keyboards with pew pew laser sounds and drum machines that sound stuck in the 80s. A reverb-drenched DJ can often be heard on mixes and between songs, who sounds like the guy hectoring you about discounts on vegetables at the food market. The picó speakers are garish and as huge as possible, and slathered with brightly colored drawings and graffiti, not unlike pimped-out cars or the old hip-hop tradition of carrying around the biggest, loudest boombox possible in the United States. Then there is the way people dance to the music, which is basically dry humping to a beat. The music is a like a car-crash combination of Afro-Colombian history and culture, maximized to make a party rage, but it’s not exactly polite or demure.
As you might expect with music so connected to street culture, it can be difficult to find a good entry point to see whether this music is your kind of thing. Short of going to a party in the barrios of Cartagena, it is tough finding solid compilations and that tell the story of Champeta or provide a solid’s disc’s worth of tunes that get the party rolling. There is also the fact that more official releases tend to emphasize the roots of the music passed down through oral tradition through the centuries rather than the more pop-sounding music that began showing up in the 1970s as a response to African funk, in addition to the fact that most releases available outside of Colombia are through one record label, Palenque Records, and its enigmatic founder Lucas Silva. There is still a lot to explore in this genre, and most available releases only scratch at the surface, but are an excellent introduction. Below I have listed some albums and blog mixes to get you started on your way to becoming an Afro-Colombian funk fanatic.
Recommended Albums:
Palenque Palenque: Champeta Criolla & Afro Roots in Colombia 1975-91
Soundway Records does an excellent job here showing how Champeta music developed from copying African records to a real genre reflecting Colombian culture. The 28-page liner notes were written by Lucas Silva, who also helped choose the track listing with Soundways records honcho Miles Cleret. Packed with great photos of champeta record sleeves and musicians sporting short shorts and afros. For a great comparison of how the music changed when transported from Africa to Colombia, compare the original version of Nigerian Fela Kuti’s “Shakara” with the cover by Lizandro Meza y su Conjunto that is included on this compilation.
Shakara by Fela Kuti:
Shacalao by Lizandro Meza y su Conjunto:
Colombiafrica – The Mystic Orchestra: Voodoo Love Inna Champeta-Land
If any Champeta disc is going to make you fall in love with the genre through its sheer and unrestrained joy, this is the one. This jam session brings together champeta stars like Viviano Torres, Luis Towers, and Justo Valdez with African musicians Dally Kimoko, Diblo Dibala, Sékou Diabaté, Nyboma, and Rigo Star, who come from countries such as Congo, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Guinea. The sunny, fluid African soukous guitar lines melt perfectly into Colombian accordion riffs and horn charts, with bouncy rhythms throughout making this perfect for a party or just picking yourself up out of a funk.
Batata y Su Rumba Palenquera: Radio Bakongo
Palenquero Singer and songwriter Paulino Salgado, or “Batata” (Sweet Potato) was in his seventies when he recorded this album, but you would never guess it from the vitality of these recordings. In his career has a drummer, he toured for two decades with famous Colombian singer Toto la Momposina as a drummer, and she recorded a number of his compositions as well. This is the only available album where Salgado actually led the proceedings before passing away in 2004, and the “Vallenato goes to Africa” sound of this disc caps a career spent keeping the musical links between Colombia and Africa alive.
For stuff that is closer to what you might hear on a contemporary Cartagena radio station, try this mix, which was put together by Fabian Altahona, who edits the Africolombia blog. The blog is a great source for all kinds of Afro-Colombian music, especially dubbed into MP3s from the original vinyl records, including lots of champeta but also Afro-Colombian contributions to such traditionally Colombian genres as cumbia, mapalé, porro, and salsa.
For myriad examples of Champeta musicians playing live and dancers grinding alone, check out this documentary, also put together by Lucas Silva (Warning: it’s in French):
This snippet of an English-language documentary describes how a famous welterweight champion boxer from San Basilio de Palenque helped to bring electricity, and thus sound systems, to the town back in the 1970s, unwittingly revolutionizing Afro-Colombian music. This documentary also features some eye-opening interviews with hard-partying senior citizen Palenqueros, as well as footage from a local percussionist’s funeral:
People from the departments of Antioquia, Quindio, Caldas, and Risaraldas (big cities: Medellin, Manizales, Armenia, and Pereira) are called Paisas, supposedly because when the region was thinking about separating from Colombia, they called it Pais A (Country A) for Pais Antioqueño, and the name stuck for the people, who are generally very proud of their heritage and speak with a distinct accent full of “sh” sounds. The region is colored red on the map below:
Although most any Colombian will tell you that the bandeja paisa (Paisa tray or Paisa platter) is a traditional meal from throughout Colombian history, much of that is bunk. Many of the ingredients in this meal are from all over the place, and not typically from the region. In cooking literature, there is no reference to “bandeja paisa” before 1950, and food historians typically credit the rise of the dish in popularity as a triumph of restauranteur marketing rather than something campesinos ate before a day working hard in the fields, which is what one Colombian told me when I was a much more incredulous Gringo fresh off the plane.
The main thing to know before eating a bandeja paisa is whether you are hungry before you order it. There is a LOT of food on this plate. Let’s break it down into its component parts:
Red kidney beans – Same ones you would put in some Texas chili.
White rice – I usually hate this flavorless type of rice that accompanies almost every Colombian meal, but at least in a bandeja paisa I can mix the rice with the beans and ground beef so that it has some flavor.
Ground beef – Your basic hamburger/sloppy joe chopmeat.
Pork rind – Fried pig skin, or chicharron in Spanish.
Fried egg – Sunny side up
Fried plantain – Similar to a banana.
Chorizo – A smoked sausage
Arepa – Small tortilla made of cornmeal or flour. While some types of arepas have cheese inside and are absolutely delicious, the one usually included with a bandeja paisa tastes like cardboard.
Hogao – A sometimes spicy sauce made with onions and tomatoes. Also known as “guiso”.
Morcilla (Blood sausage) – A sausage made by cooking pig’s blood, mixing it with rice, and letting the combo congeal into a delicious sausage. The English usually call their similar version of this sausage “black pudding”.
And finally, a slice of avocado.
I have never tried cooking a bandeja paisa, mainly because the large variety of separate ingredients to cook intimidates me into laziness. When I cook Colombian food, I generally prefer it to be a soup where I can just throw a bunch of ingredients into a pot and wait until they mix together into a delicious stew. But if you want to try it yourself, take a gander at this recipe from my favorite English-language Colombian cooking site, which is run by a Paisa who knows her stuff.
And there you have it. Probably not the best thing for your waistline with all those calories and grams of fat, but there is little else in Colombian cuisine more satisfying than this dish weighing down your stomach like a rock. Just make sure you are not too far from a bathroom after eating one.
The Pacific coast is a fascinating part of Colombia. Highways have not yet arrived to many parts of the area, and the only way to get to some towns is by boat or airplane. Being that many of the residents of the Pacific coast are poor black fisherman, they don’t get a lot of chances to get out, and it feels isolated, like Colombia’s own Deliverance-like south. I didn’t see more than a couple other gringo tourists while I was there, and even Colombians from other regions were not numerous.
La Barra is an isolated village in this neck of the woods where the movie takes place, a real town that is actually in the department of Valle de Cauca on the Pacific coast, close to Buenaventura and just south of Choco. There is a white guy called “Paisa” (Jaime Andres Castano) meaning he is from the region surrounding Medellin, who wants to build a hotel on the beach, mirroring the real-life situation of Paisas buying up cheap land in the town of La Villa to build surf hostels on the shore. Daniel (Rodrigo Velez, pictured above on the left) is a guy who comes from some hip urban enclave. He wants to find a motorboat out of the region so that he can continue his backpacking. Daniel has problems; he looks at a woman’s photo from time to time, but we are never quite sure what’s wrong with him. He is travelling on the cheap and stays with Cerebro (Brain) (Arnobio Salazar Rivas, pictured above on the right), a local fisherman with money problems. There seems to be no fish in the waters nearby, and so Brain has no cash, and all the motorboats are far away, leaving Daniel stranded. Daniel’s money is robbed, so he has to help Cerebro with things like cleaning debris on the beach to pay his room and board. The Paisa, meanwhile, disrupts the quiet village with loud speakers that blast reggaeton. The Paisa has the modern rights to the land, but the Afro-Colombians have lived here since the days when slaves escaped from their masters to hide in the jungle, and resent the interloper.
The movie moves sloooow. It plods lethargically with the same general rhythm of daily life in the region, capturing the way that people don’t seem to measure time in the same manner over there. Much like the Daniel in the film, I was looking for a boat from Bahia Solano to Buenaventura to continue on my journey when I was travelling through the region, and there were no schedules or guarantees that one would even arrive. Sometimes a boat came, sometimes it didn’t. I felt like a total uptight Gringo looking for some sort of timetable. The beaches and jungle are unspoiled as of now; the Paisa’s “development” in the film is not much more than some cabanas on the beach and a fence made of plywood to make a claim on the beach, which the Afro-Colombians have no trouble dismantling. The area gets less sunshine than the Caribbean coast, and of course paramilitaries and guerillas lurking in the local jungles haven’t helped make tourism much of a burgeoning industry in that region. The film captures a sense of this part of Colombia as one of the last frontiers, still surrounded by thick, difficult rain forest and full of people eking out a living off the land. But modernity is coming, in the form of outsiders with disposable income for travel and investment. The film is uneasy about how these foreigners will change the culture and environment of the Pacific coast, even as the changes are pretty much inevitable.
Technically, Afro-Colombians in this part of Colombia have their rights protected by constitutional court decisions to be in control of their heritage, including the lands they have settled, to avoid exploitation by outsiders. However, many Afro-Colombians have subpar literacy, and are unaware of their rights, making them easy targets for narcos, palm oil and mining companies, and illegally armed groups seeking to drive them off their land. A constitutional provision that guarantees a land title to rural Afro-Colombian communities that have organized loosely as a group and occupied their property for 10 years or more does exist, but is often difficult to enforce. As the descendants of escaped slaves once again begin to feel the effects of oppression, will they run or defend what is rightfully theirs? It is the rhetorical question at the heart of this film, and it lingers uncomfortably without an answer.
Colombian salsa legend Joe Arroyo died today at the age of 55 after being hospitalized for several weeks with a variety of health problems. Arroyo’s performances as a salsa singer with bands such as Fruko & sus Tesos and Latin Brothers, as well as solo with his backing band La Verdad, brought Colombia’s unique spin on salsa to a worldwide audience. His specialty was weaving the sounds of African and Caribbean music into salsa, making it more rhythmically forceful and spastically energetic than the salsa coming out of New York and Puerto Rico at the same time. However, the most obvious was to know if you are hearing a Joe Arroyo tune is to listen for his imitation of a horse whinny, which he inserted into almost all of his songs. His death comes just as his popularity was back on the rise thanks to a new telenovela onColombia television based on the story of his life. I’ve been hearing his most famous song, “Rebelion”, at almost every club I’ve gone out to recently, and sadly, it will probably become even more popular in the wake of his death.
Anyway, as far as the music goes, Arroyo left an entire discography full of catchy, danceable songs guaranteed to excite any party into salsa frenzy. I’ve put some of my favorites below, I hope you enjoy them and remember the good times. It is a sad day for Colombian music.
La Noche (The Night)
La Rebelion (The Rebellion)
El Ausente (The Missing Person)
Tania – NB: This is a song about Joe’s daughter
Ella y Tu (You and her)
El Caminante (The Traveler)
Manyoma (for Wilson Manyoma, another singer in Fruko & sus Tesos)
Yamulemau (an African word from the country of Gambia, which supposedly means “The Boy from Blue Water”)
